Page 53 of Moonshine Kiss
“Bowie! Bowie Bodine? Good guy? Next-door neighbor Bowie? ‘Never ask me about Bowie again’ Bowie?”
“That’s the one,” I said accelerating up the steep hill to The Lookout.
While the rest of town was asleep on this frosty winter night, The Lookout’s lights were blazing, and the parking lot was half-full.
“How do you not know if you had sex with Bowie?” Scarlett demanded. “I’m coming over. This is a face-to-face discussion. Ouch! Jedediah! Stop clawing the shit out of me!”
“It’s a technical Tab A Slot B question,” I told her. “And I’m just pulling into The Lookout for a disturbance.”
“If you don’t call me tomorrow I will hunt you down and—ouch! Stop biting!”
“George and Eddie never bite me,” I teased, throwing the car into park and climbing out. At least the fight hadn’t spilled out into the parking lot.
“That was Dev biting me, not the cat,” Scarlett said smugly.
A barstool exploded through The Lookout’s plate glass window and landed with a metallic thunk on the sidewalk. It rolled back and forth over crystals of glass.
“Shit. I gotta go.”
“Tell Gram-Gram I said hi.”
26
Cassidy
My grandmother was a woman of contradiction. She went to church twice a month, baked an exquisite lemon cake with homemade icing for my birthday every year, and was currently wielding a pool stick at Myrt Crabapple.
Myrt had a good seven inches and fifty pounds on my grandmother. But her glass eye and arthritis evened the odds. She was trying to break a beer bottle off of the bar.Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Nicolette was calmly filling a pitcher of ice water to dump on them.
“Gram-Gram!” My voice snapped with authority. Unlike my father, Gram-Gram could usually forgive me for playing cop.
My grandmother dropped the pool cue.
“Shit. It’s the po-po,” Myrt yelled. Myrt thought she was whispering, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t hear a damn thing.
“Cassidy, sweetie! What are you doing here?” Gram-Gram asked sweetly. She was wearing her Bootleg Bingo sweatshirt, and judging from the bingo cards and overturned tables everywhere, the games hadn’t gone someone’s way.
“Who threw the stool?” I asked calmly.
Nicolette placed the pitcher on the bar and nodded to me. Bootleg senior citizens were an unruly bunch, but a good dousing was usually all it took to break up any altercations. They didn’t much care for their polyester outfits to get wet.
“What stool?” my grandma asked innocently.
“The one spinning around like a top in front of Trent McCulty’s pickup truck.”
“She did it,” Myrt hollered, pointing a gnarled finger at Gram.
The crowd around us erupted as everyone tried to explain all at once. I looked at them. White hair and crooked glasses. Flannel and ugly sweaters. A shoving match broke out between Old Jefferson Waverly and Marvin Lloyd. Granny Louisa and Estelle were trying to look innocent over by the jukebox.
“Knock it off, y’all,” I shouted over the din, reaching for the pitcher of water.
I could have given it another minute. Neither man had much energy and they were both already huffing and puffing like steam engines. But I’d had a rough night and I just wanted to go home and figure out whether or not Bowie and I had sex and what, if anything, that meant.
I threw the water in their faces and then tossed the pitcher on the ground. “Everybody better get real orderly or I will drag every single one of you downtown, and y’all know how uncomfortable the cots are in that cell.”
We had one official jail cell in town. And most of these fine citizens had spent at least a night in it at some point.
